Mark T. Nelson

Alexander Miller has recently considered an ingenious extension of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit's account of 'program explanation' as a way of defending non-reductive naturalist versions of moral realism against Harman's explanatory criticism. Despite the ingenuity of this extension, Miller concludes that program explanation cannot help such moral realists in their attempt to defend moral properties. Specifically, he argues that such moral program explanations are dispensable from an epistemically unlimited point of view. I show that Miller's argument for this negative claim is inadequate, and that he has, in spite of himself, identified a promising defence of moral realism.

This paper is critical examination of eliminativism in the philosophy of mind. I begin by identifying eliminativism over and against two other positions in the mind/brain debate. I examine a 'postulational' version of the argument and Richard Rorty's version, arguing that the former is best interpreted as an attempt to eliminate singular terms whereas the latter is best interpreted as an attempt to eliminate predicates. I then set the eliminativism debate in the context of the metaphilosphical debate over substantive vs methodological commitments, concluding that the non-eliminativists/particularists need not find the eliminativist argument compelling.

In ethics, it is commonly supposed that we have both positive duties and negative duties, things we ought to do and things we ought not to do. Given the many parallels between ethics and epistemology, we might suppose that the same is true in epistemology, and that we have both positive epistemic duties and negative epistemic duties. I argue that this is false; that is, that we have negative epistemic duties, but no positive ones. There are things that we ought not to believe, but there is nothing that we ought to believe, on purely epistemic grounds. I also consider why the parallels between ethics and epistemology break down at this particular point, suggesting that it is due to what I call the infinite justificational ‘fecundity’ of perceptual and propositional evidence